The Imagination: An Essential Element In The Success Of An Individual

3 Pages 751 Words

Alfred North Whitehead and Sigmund Freud both wrote pieces indirectly dealing with the imagination. In his essay, “Universities and Their Function,” Whitehead stresses that a university can be valuable only—and only if—it provides an imaginative form of gaining knowledge. He repeatedly states that a university’s main purpose, passing on knowledge using one’s imagination, creates deeper, more vivid meaning to plain detail. In contrast, Freud argues in his essay, “Fifth Lecture,” that the imagination enables individuals to transform their dreams into reality. Correctly using their imagination, an individual can succeed the ambitions they desire and ceased in their fantasy world. Similarly, both Whitehead and Freud’s main focus pertain to the imagination, yet they use the term diversely.
Both Whitehead and Freud use the imagination in their works, however they signify dissimilar meanings in context. Whitehead’s essay, illustrates the imagination as the “creative faculty of the mind in its highest aspect; the power of framing new and striking intellectual conceptions” (OED 2). This definition demonstrates how the imagination “transforms knowledge” from a dull, tedious detail into a fact “invested with all its possibilities” (Whitehead 85). This allows students to enlighten tiresome information into stimulating, creative thoughts and ideas with profound meanings. Dissimilarly, Freud’s essay, articulates imagination, the “action of imagining, or forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses,” as a tool an individual can use to fulfill a dream (OED 2). Since life normally encounters numerous displeasures, the imagination “[compensates] what is lacking in the sphere of reality” by allowing individuals to conquer their desires by transforming them into actuality (Freud 5). Hence, the imagination serves as a miraculous resource to set in motion individuals’ dr...